Thursday, July 27, 2017
Friday, July 14, 2017
Where women are killed by their own families
If the headline of this news article would be the only thing showing up, then a lot of people around the world would've assumed that this news article must've been talking about a country where there's Shariah (Islamic law) & where husbands can have up to 4 wives & Islam rules the land etc. All thanks to Western media.
But this news story, although still quite sad & unfortunate, is of the Central American countries where Christianity rules the land. As per the article, top 3 countries in the world where women are most in danger are El Salvador, Jamaica, & Guatemala, & in these countries, Christianity is 80%, 72%, & 87%, respectively.
Now, someone would say, what religion has to do with abusing women. And they would be correct. Religion has nothing to do with how women are treated in the general public. Heck, all major religions pretty much preach the same ideals to run a peaceful & respectful society. But, then, the Western media force feeds the public around the world that Islam teaches its male followers to abuse women.
No, abusing women has nothing to do with Islam or Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism or any other religion for that matter.
Abuse of women is correlated with the illiteracy, lack of knowledge, special circumstances, & cultural aspects of a society. If a woman is abused in India, that's nothing to do with Hinduism or Islam, but it has to do with how the males are raised to think of women as a sub-species of some sort, or sexual objects, & hence treat them as such. Special circumstance would be as the article suggests that Guatemalan society suffered a 3-decade long war in which men were trained to abuse women. Those men were never re-trained to live in the post-war society as normal humans & hence they abused their own family women. American soldiers went & going through the same thing where they are suffering from PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) & hence their loved ones are the ones who suffer the most as a result.
Blaming a specific religion for violence against women does nothing to help a society or women. It actually furthers that violent behaviour & isolate those women in need because religion becomes a target. As we can see, for instance, that clothing choices of Muslim women has become the topic du jour in the Western world of North America & Europe. Banning head scarves won't help any Muslim woman but further isolate that woman, where she might be abused even further, in silence.
Teaching women their value in society & teaching men how women are their equal partners help a society move forward. Respect & gender equality helps a society build a better future. By the way, please keep in mind here that I am not talking about Western feminism but what Islam teaches about gender equality. Western feminism is nothing to do with gender equality. That's taking the balance out of the society & swinging the pendulum way out towards the other end (woman's end) & punish all men in the process.
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Every year an estimated 66,000 women are murdered worldwide. One of the countries with the highest rate of violence against women is Guatemala - so why is it such a dangerous place to be female?
"We are being killed by our fathers, brothers, stepfathers… the very people who are supposed to care for us," says Rebeca Lane, a feminist rapper in Guatemala City.
"Most of us have to live violence in silence so when someone hits us or screams at us we just close our eyes and let go. We have to join other women and talk about it so we know this is not OK, this is not normal."
When Lane was 15, she got involved with an older man who was not only controlling, but also physically & sexually abusive. "He knew what he was doing. He isolated me from my family and friends. I know what it is to live with violence from an early age," she says. The relationship lasted for 3 years.
Now she uses her music to campaign for women's rights. "Poetry saved my life. When I started to write it was vital to my recovery," she says. Her best-known song, Mujer Lunar - Lunar Woman - is a lyrical call for respect for women's bodies, lives & independence.
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Guatemala has the third highest femicide rate in the world (after El Salvador & Jamaica) - between 2007 & 2012 there were 9.1 murders for every 100,000 women according to the National Guatemalan Police. And last year 846 women were killed in a population of little more than 15 million, says the State Prosecutors Office.
It seems the reason for this lies in the country's brutal past. Lane's main inspiration as a feminist activist is the aunt after whom she is named. She never met her father's sister, but her story helps draw a direct line between the social instability of today & Guatemala's 36-year civil war.
Lane's aunt disappeared in 1981 after she joined left-wing guerrillas fighting the military government. Around the time Lane's aunt died, news began to filter out of the rape, torture & murder of tens of thousands of women & girls - mostly from indigenous Mayan communities accused of supporting the insurgents.
More than a decade later, a UN-sponsored report said this abuse had been generalised & systematic - it estimated that 25% or 50,000 of the victims of Guatemala's war were women.
Sexual violence was "at very high levels and used as a tool of war", says Helen Mack, of the Myrna Mack Foundation. "The stereotype was that women were used for sex and seen as an object, to serve families, and this continues today."
Mack's sister, Myrna - after whom the human rights organisation is named - died after she was stabbed in the street by a military death squad in 1990. Myrna had uncovered the extent of the physical & sexual violence the army had used against Mayan communities.
During the conflict, an army of around 40,000 men & a civilian defence force of approximately one million were trained to commit acts of violence against women. When the war ended & these men returned home, they got no help in readjusting.
Mack believes they redirected their aggression towards their wives, mothers & girlfriends - a culture of violence towards women & an expectation of impunity, which still persists today, developed.
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In Mack's experience, it is common for women to be threatened in this way or even killed by their attackers. Violence against women is still considered a domestic matter, she says, despite new laws against femicide & other forms of violence against women. In 2008 Guatemala became the first country to officially recognise femicide - the murder of a woman because of her gender - as a crime.
"The difference in Guatemala between the murder of a woman and of a man is that the woman is made to suffer before death, she is raped, mutilated and beaten," says the country's Attorney General Thelma Aldana.
Aldana is trying to change attitudes towards victims who are often blamed for the abuse they receive. "A few years ago the police and forensic investigators would arrive on a crime scene and say, "Look how she is dressed - that is why they killed her [or] she was coming out of a disco at 1am - she was asking for it."
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"The justice system can do a lot to change culture," she says.
"We asked women to come forward and break the silence. Femicide and other forms of violence against women are now the crimes that are most reported in the country, with an average of 56,000 reports a year - this includes rape, sexual violence, physical and economic violence and murder."
There are now femicide tribunals in 11 of the country's 22 departments or provinces where the judges & police officers receive gender crime training.
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Who's Profiting from Israel's Offensive in Gaza?
A little insight, through a great interview, into why there has never been peace in Middle East, since the founding of Israel, & how there will never be any peace over there. Major reason: Military-Industrial Complex.
This military-industrial complex will never rest until the whole world is in flames. There are wars being fought all over the world. This piece is highlighting how Israel uses Gaza as a live experiment space for its weapons, & uses the success rates of the war as a major selling point. But, other major industrial, developed, countries, who always say, on one hand, that they are working hard for peace around the world, &, on the other hand, sell & promote weapons of mass destruction to the whole world. For instance, UK keeps selling its weapons to Saudi Arabia, which is using those weapons against poor Yemenis in its years-long, useless war against Yemen.
The general public is either so naive or stupid that it doesn't see who are the actual puppeteers behind all these wars around the world. Hamas & Palestinians get blamed for the violence & wars in Israel & Occupied Territories. Nobody points any fingers towards Israel & how its own weapon companies are profiting by killing innocent Palestinians. Hamas may use Palestinians as human shields but it doesn't raise $132,000 per Palestinian head in financing for new weapons.
Similarly, Pakistan, India, Colombia, Afghanistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Congo, UAE, Iraq, Libya & many other developing countries have been, are being, & will be blamed for violence in their regions, but nobody will make the UN Security Council members accountable for their actions in creating unrest around the world. US, China, Russia, UK, France, Germany, Canada, & even Sweden actively manufacture, promote, & sell weapons, & these weapons are a major source of their exports & GDP.
So, how can ever there be peace on this Earth, when developed countries, who are perceived as the role models on such issues as leadership, governance, economics, business, development etc. are the ones hawking weapons of mass destruction, pushing developing countries towards wars, & profiting from killing & destruction of lives of innocent people around the world?
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JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: So, Shir, the violence continues in Gaza, and it begs the question, who is actually profiting from this war?
SHIR HEVER, ECONOMIST, ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER: I have to say it feels very cynical to talk about economy and profiteers when we're talking about such a massive human tragedy and so many people killed--murdered, actually. But I think it is very important to understand the economic aspect of it, because it also tells us a little bit why, why this is happening, and maybe also gives us an idea of what is required in order to stop it.
We've seen in the last couple of years a pattern. Every two years or so, the Israeli military attacks Gaza, attacks the Gaza Strip, and causes a lot of destruction. But right after each one of those attacks, there is a trade show in which Israeli weapon companies show their wares, show their technologies, and boast that these are the very technologies that have been used just now against Palestinians in Gaza. We saw that after the attack of 2008-2009, known as Cast Lead, where the main theme was those robots that go into houses to look around corners. Then we saw that again in the attack of 2012, which was called Pillar of Cloud, in which the main theme was the Iron Dome system that can intercept the Palestinian rockets. And now, in the current attack, we have again the Iron Dome system that is supposed to intercept rockets.
And all of these Israeli companies, which are becoming an increasingly important and very significant part of the Israeli export system and the Israeli economy, depend on those wars. They depend on periodic fighting where they can showcase their equipment, their technology. And the first thing that they say when they try to market whatever it is that they develop: we've already used that on actual human beings. And by making that claim, they're able to compete with weapon manufacturers from other countries.
DESVARIEUX: But, Shir, which companies are we talking about here? And are any of them connected to the United States?
HEVER: One of the major companies that we're talking about is Israeli Aerospace Industries. This company, there was a little article about it in the newspaper just two days ago that right now, in the middle of this attack, they've issued a call--they've issued bonds and tried to raise finance in order to expand the company and increase their production. And they were able to raise $132 million in just one week, which comes up as $132,000 per Palestinian killed in this attack. By now, there are more Palestinians who have been killed, but by now the company's also sold additional bonds. And this company sees a direct relation between the violence against Gaza and the ability of this company to find new markets for its products.
Another very prominent company is called Elbit Systems. This is a very famous Israeli company which specializes in drones. And, of course, they're also very active in this war.
All of these companies are also extremely connected to the United States. And the United States is the biggest supplier of aid, military aid to Israel. And this military aid comes in the form of weapons, actually. So these military companies have learned to work in symbiosis with the U.S. arms industry so that they develop their technologies together in order to provide components which are produced in Israel and work with U.S.-manufactured weapons. So, in fact, this war is not, this attack on Gaza is not just a trade show for the Israeli arms industry; it's also a trade show for the United States arms industry. And the demand for weapons always increases every time Israel goes into another cycle of violence in the Middle East.
I think there's one point that is very important to make, though, because through understanding the importance of the arms trade to this conflict, we can also understand why the Hamas Party has made its ceasefire proposition, joined with the Islamic Jihad about two weeks ago, in which they offered a ten-year ceasefire. Now, Hamas is [an] acronym for Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah, which means the Islamic resistance movement. Their whole idea is to resist the occupation. And they basically said in their ceasefire offer, we're willing to stop resisting the occupation for ten years. And I think they only could make that offer because they knew that Israel would not accept it. They knew that the Israeli arms industry is so dependent on these cycles of attacks every two years that Israel will never accept a ten-year ceasefire, because it would be a deadly blow to the Israeli arms industry.
Sunday, June 18, 2017
US states score poorly on cronyism & corruption test
It's quite surprising to me that the whole world thinks that corruption & cronyism don't exist in the Western world. Somehow, white skin means fairness, equality, merit, compassion etc. International organizations, like Transparency International, deride governments of Brazil, India, South Africa, Nigeria, Russia etc. for their unaccountability, corruption, & no ethics, but governments of UK, Canada, US, Australia, Japan etc. get a free pass. Why?
The latest election of Donald Trump, & then his appointments of his own son-in-law & daughter, in the White House posts are great examples of nepotism & cronyism (yes, his daughter doesn't have an official post, but she is sitting in on all presidential meetings.) Government lawmakers keep threatening that Trump could be in serious legal trouble if he doesn't divest of his personal business while he is the President of US, but they all seem to be empty threats. Some might say here that that's because he is a Republican, & Republicans / Conservatives are corrupt. But, as the article states, that even Democratic states have the same level of corruption as Republican states. So, the corruption is bipartisan. Ironically, corruption is one thing which unites every stateperson, all over the world, regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, etc.
As I always say that the colour of the human blood is red. Every human is same. Corruption in the government exists everywhere; be it in Pakistan, or UK, or US, or Canada or Madagascar. Politics has become the playground of the rich & corrupt. Ethically conscientious people are never given a chance to prove their mettle in the highest office in the land. Corrupt people in the government don't want an ethically conscientious person in charge of their affairs because then they will need to straighten themselves up. As Mr. Stern says in the last paragraph of the article that, "it’s very, very difficult for legislatures to focus on these things and improve them because they don’t want these laws, they don’t want to enforce them, and they don’t want to fund the people enforcing them."
Furthermore, what does it say about the democracy in the West. Democracy is supposed to mean that the general public not only freely chooses its own leaders but also keeps a tab on its leaders, & if & when, they seem to be not working for the general public, then the the public has the full control to remove that leadership. Well, in the absence of accountability of opaque state records, wouldn't you say that it would be a little hard to keep an eye on what the government is actually doing, & hence, harder still to remove them if they don't follow what the general public wants them to do. So, if the general public doesn't have any control on the government, then is this democracy? May I kindly remind you here that merely voting is not democracy. Voting takes place in many places. That doesn't mean that there's democracy.
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The majority of state governments are hotbeds of cronyism, with the public shut out from true accountability by loophole-ridden open-records laws, according to a new report on the integrity of statehouses throughout the US.
Eleven of the 50 US states received failing grades for transparency and accountability, while only three earned a score about 70%. Alaska, with a score of 76, a "C" grade, was rated highest by the Center for Public Integrity, which just released its 2015 State Integrity Investigation, "a data-driven assessment of state government." Michigan came in dead last, with a score of 51.
"The State Integrity Investigation assesses the existence, effectiveness, & accessibility (i.e. citizen access) of key governance & anti-corruption mechanisms through a qualitative & indicator-based research process," the Center for Public Integrity and its partner, Global Integrity, explained their comprehensive probe of state laws & political cultures from coast to coast.
The investigation's findings are a cavalcade of embarrassing revelations about the overall climate of government transparency in the United States. From states that exempt entire branches of their government from open-records laws to states that absolutely refuse to seriously investigate ethics violations, the report's findings are “disappointing but not surprising,” said Paula A. Franzese, a state government ethics expert at the Seton Hall University School of Law.
In New Mexico, for instance, legislators passed a resolution – without needing the governor's approval – to exempt their emails from public records inquiries. "I think it’s up to me to decide if you can have my record,” one New Mexico representative said of the 2013 effort.
Delaware's Public Integrity Commission, the state's lobbying & ethics watchdog, has just two full-time staff members, the probe revealed. In 2013, a special state prosecutor found that the agency was so shorthanded, it was not able “to undertake any serious inquiry or investigation into potential wrongdoing.”
In 70% of states, part-time state lawmakers can vote on bills that present a clear conflict of interest with their private dealings. Such was the case in Missouri this year, when a legislator introduced a bill barring municipalities from banning plastic bags at grocery stores. The lawmaker – the director for the Missouri Grocers Association – claimed he was standing up for shopper rights. The bill eventually passed, overriding the governor's veto.
The investigation included assessments of 13 categories within all 50 state governments. Those categories included: public access to information, political finance, electoral oversight, executive accountability, legislative accountability, judicial accountability, state budget processes, state civil service management, procurement, internal auditing, lobbying disclosure, ethics enforcement agencies, & state pension fund management.
For each state, the Center for Public Integrity & Global Integrity contacted numerous state-level organizations & experts involved in government transparency & accountability to weigh-in on a host of questions pertaining to state government operations. The report, then, is a result of a "blend of social science and journalism" with an "aim to assessing the most salient corruption risks in each state."
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Many lowest-ranked states are bastions of American conservatism, where politicians champion limited government. Yet those states, such as Nevada & Wyoming, were joined at the bottom by the likes of Pennsylvania & Delaware, East Coast states that are considered politically liberal compared to the rest of the US.
“It’s very, very difficult for legislatures to focus on these things and improve them because they don’t want these laws, they don’t want to enforce them, and they don’t want to fund the people enforcing them," said Robert Stern, former president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a now-defunct organization dedicated to ethics & lobbying laws in local & state governments.
An Occupier's Peace or a Just Peace - Shir Hever on RAI
The decades-old conflict in Middle East, between Israel & Palestine, won't end so easily, as the Global West perceives it to be, because a "just peace" have to be brought in for everyone living there. In a society, where there's "just peace," people need to have equal rights & obligations.
The current conflict will continue on until the occupying force, Israel, only wants peace on its terms, & of course, the conflict itself is helping to line the pockets of influential people in Israel & around the world. Political & military elites, & esp. the conservatives in North America & Europe want this conflict to continue on because they are profiting from it immensely. Of course, the average joe in Israel & the occupied territories of Palestine merely wants peace where everyone has equal rights.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So if you're going to talk about what the future might look like, what a peace, if possible, might look like, you've first got to talk about, well, who actually wants peace, and on what basis do they want peace? ... There are a few people in Israel who are doing extremely well out of the current situation. There's a stratum of multimillionaires and billionaires, a political stratum. I mean, why would they want anything other than what they got?
SHIR HEVER, ECONOMIST, ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER: I think the vast majority of the Israeli public wants peace. But a famous German military thinker, Clausewitz, has once said the occupier always wants peace. Peace means the status quo. That's why Palestinians don't call for peace, they call for a just peace. And that's also why the Israeli peace movement has collapsed because the peace movement had this kind of idea that if Palestinians would be offered peace, they would just accept that the current situation will continue. And, of course, that's a completely false premise.
But there are, of course, people in Israel who do have an incentive to end the occupation and to end the injustice. A lot of Israelis are suffering because of the massive cost of security that is needed to repress the Palestinians. I would say the majority of Israelis are losing in their standard of living because of this continued repression of Palestinians, because of the continued conflict. So they have a real interest even in a just peace, but their voices are not heard and they cannot be heard within this kind of colonial system, which is dominated by those elites who are actually profiting.
JAY: So talk a bit about the elites because it's a very small group that own the dominating, commanding heights of the Israeli economy.
HEVER: Yeah. And I would say the major forces that push Israel in this direction of continued conflict and continued occupation are actually outside of Israel. These are the forces--the U.S. government and right-wing groups within the U.S.--that fund the most extremist and violent political movements inside Israel. Sheldon Adelson in the U.S. has opened up a free newspaper in Israel in order to make sure that Netanyahu keeps winning the elections with a massive investment that no one on the other side can match. So that sort of support makes sure that the hawks continue to dominate the political structure.
Sure, there are also Israeli security companies and military companies that are very powerful and very influential. In fact, there was a meeting in 2011 of 80 of Israel's biggest capitalists but not from the security sector, which said, if Israel will continue on this path, we're going to get to the situation of South Africa, we're going to be boycotted by the world, we have to do something. They had this emergency meeting. But they couldn't actually do something. It shows that even capital has its limits. They couldn't find a way to convince the government to act differently because there's just no historical precedent for that. There is no historical precedent of a colonial power which just stops in its tracks and says, this is wrong, we should allow these people freedom and equality.
JAY: Would you say if outside of the security-military-industrial complex, if you will, the rest of the majority of big capital would actually like to see a resolution of this?
HEVER: Yes, yes. And they've tried a couple times to fund their own candidates for prime minister and spent a lot of money on that. The public didn't vote for these candidates. The public wants a strong leader that can say--a sort of security person who can say--I will be a representative of your national pride, I will make sure Israel is safe, I will fight Iran, and so on. And when somebody says, if we end the occupation it's actually good for the economy, this sort of argument doesn't get--.
JAY: But if their heart was really in it--and they being these other big capitalists--I mean, they could match Sheldon Adleson and they could have their own TV stations and their own newspapers. I mean, they could really go at it. Is their heart really in it? They're doing so well the way things are.
HEVER: I think they estimate that if they do that, people will not see that, won't watch that television or will not read the newspaper. And they're right because people don't like to read that they're in the wrong, and that things have to change, and that political power has to be shared. They don't want to read that.
JAY: Alright. ... what is a model that if you could even think ten, twenty, thirty years out, if you were going to try to create a model that would be, one, sellable, not just just. I mean, you can imagine a just model, which is pretty straightforward. It's a Democratic, single secular state and everybody gets to vote and it's a modern country. But right now that's not a sellable proposition. So some people have talked a possible federated state, where you have a province or a state within a Federation which is primarily Jewish. Hebrew would be the language. You would have another one, another state, which is primarily--Arabic is the primary language, and so on, or some configuration. You must have thought about this. What might be possible?
HEVER: It's not only that I've thought about it, that this is also almost an obsession, but not just for me, but for political activists, for leftists for years.
But I want to answer you in two parts. The first part, I have to say, again I have to be very sensitive to my own position of privilege. Being an Israeli Jew and saying well, this is the solution is not going to work, and it shouldn't be, it shouldn't work. Palestinians should not get their solution from some Israeli. They have to come up with their own platform for political change. And therefore, I have to be very careful in how I answer that sort of question.
Having said that, let me tell you what voices I hear from my Palestinian friends about what they're saying. And among these voices, you can hear a lot of those ideas of a federation, a confederation, two separate states, three separate states, one democratic state, joining with Egypt. You can hear a lot of interesting ideas. But the voice that comes out the clearest in the last few years is the voice that says, we don't care about that. All of these ideas are legal demarcations, are some kind of--where you put the border here or there. That's not important. The important thing is to talk about rights, talk about how we have the right to move wherever we want, to say whatever we want, to have a government that represents us, to organize, to practice our religion, to trade freely. That's what it means to be free. And then it doesn't matter so much exactly how many borders you're going to stretch across this territory. If we're practical about it, historically Palestine is a country that was divided by the UN, but in fact there has never been a Palestinian state there. There's always been one powerful force of Israel and some areas that were temporarily held by Egypt and Jordan, and then Israel occupied these parts as well. Now we have a situation in which there's one state under Israeli domination with a population of 12 million: 49% Jews, 49% Palestinians, 2% others. And it's an apartheid state.
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JAY: What I'm getting at, ... if there's going to be rights, there's going to have to be at some point some kind of buy-in by enough Israeli Jews to go along with this, I mean, unless you think there's going to be some military defeat of the Israeli state, and it's hard to imagine that right now. Even if the American policy was to significantly shift, you still have a mass of Jewish-Israeli public opinion that is where it is. I mean, it's in not a very good place. There's got to be some kind of understanding of how that's going to be dealt with to create a model that's at least the next step.
HEVER: There's this famous British general that once said in Zimbabwe, whatever happens, we have machine guns and they don't. And they lost. So the military defeat is not so unimaginable, but, of course, it'll be further down the road. It's not going to be in the next few years.
I think the fact is that a Jewish state is not sustainable. It's a concept that doesn't fit the 21st century. It barely fits into the 20th century. It's a racist idea.
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JAY: Well, I was about to get to that, 'cause then you get to the campaign for boycotting, disinvestment, and sanctions. It's clearly having some influence. It's hurting the Israeli economy. If it was stronger, it could precipitate more self-interest in some kind of change in Israel. But don't you then still have to have--okay, then what does that look like? 'Cause if you get to a point of real rights the way you're talking about, this can't be a Jewish state anymore.
HEVER: Exactly. Yeah. It cannot be a Jewish state. It's going to be--I mean, even if there will be a separate Palestinian state according to what we call the two-state solution, then the battle will continue. The struggle for equal rights in Israel will continue, because Israel cannot be a Jewish state; it has to be a state for all its citizens, one way or another. And the way that this defeat comes, it comes very suddenly. And, of course, the model is South Africa, where one week before apartheid collapsed, 90% of white people in South Africa supported apartheid. One week after apartheid collapsed, they all say we were always against it. And the Israeli minister of justice, Tzipi Livni, just said a couple of weeks ago, in response to the BDS movement, she said, I went to South Africa and spoke to some Jewish people there about their experiences from this era of the fall of apartheid, and the main thing they told me is it came unexpectedly, it came suddenly. There is a moment in which you lose courage, you lose your faith that you can continue to repress other people forever. And that moment may not be as far as we believe. I'm hopeful.
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Saturday, June 17, 2017
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